I did the removing and draining and re-acclimating with saltyshrimp. Took a disgusting amount of time to catch all the babies, but it did work. Keep the filter media wet and hopefully all the plants we to keep biofilm alive. This is a money sink. Do the saltytshrimp then just work with what you have imo, stability is super important.
Have you tried aging your fresh water before you fill on a water change? I “age” 5 gallons of conditioned water for 24 hours before my water change and fill with that. My tap water swings in ph as it rests. Test your water straight out of the tap and then in a glass after a few hours and see if they’re different. I was having the same kind of issues and I don’t anymore. It’s a little more work but I don’t have die offs and I have good populations in several shrimp tanks.
Had the same problem, what this sub suggested was:
Stop doing water changes, just slowly top off with RO water.
Keep track of your water parameter and do water change ONLY if necessary. Seriously, your tank probably doesn’t need water changes anyway (live plants are important here).
I also bought trace minerals and gh+ in liquid form and am adding them to my top off water every other day.
It’s been like month or two since I asked reddit for help and now I have new batch of babies swimming around and 3 pregnant mamas!
This is the way. Use bottled RO. Stabile water parms is the key. I keep shrimp with copper pipe and all is good. I found less water changes are better. Never gravel vac.
Neos can live in hard water when it’s consistent. They use them as ‘dither-fish’ in Sulawesi tanks to make them confident to come out in the tank.
> I use a squirt of Thrive-S ferts
I think that you might be spiking phosphates (or something) in your tank during water changes. First, run some activated carbon in the tank to see if there’s a toxin you’re unaware of, then try doing weekly, 20% water changes for a month without ferts, or any additives, and see what happens.
Finally, instead of using SaltyS to re-mineralize RO water, you can just dilute treated-tapwater with RO until you get your desired TDS. It would be easier to keep consistent and less expensive, once you buy your RO filter.
>Should I remove the shrimp, drain the tank and acclimate them
This. Do ensure you TDS/GH/KH/Temperature acclimate them (takes hours if done correctly) and put them back in.
This is clearly a toxic environment for them and *slowly* switching to distilled/RO is only delaying them from being comfortable. Then, don’t do any water changes and only top-off with distilled/RO as needed. I haven’t done water changes in my shrimp tanks for years and some are in bare-bottom tanks with just moss and floating plants.
>Tank is fairly heavily planted
This is not heavily planted, especially not with plants that absorb nitrogen efficiently (outside of the floaters). 20% of tank filled with some fast grower like limnophila sessiliflora will do more for water than all the plants you have today and 100% floater coverage will remove more than any submerged plant would. Not a problem if keeping only shrimp though! More [here](https://aquariumscience.org/index.php/6-6-aquaponic-filtration/)
Sweetnlow1981 
I would slowly switch to RO with every waterchange. Tho you can surely change more per week than you usually do.
I did the removing and draining and re-acclimating with saltyshrimp. Took a disgusting amount of time to catch all the babies, but it did work. Keep the filter media wet and hopefully all the plants we to keep biofilm alive. This is a money sink. Do the saltytshrimp then just work with what you have imo, stability is super important.
Have you tried aging your fresh water before you fill on a water change? I “age” 5 gallons of conditioned water for 24 hours before my water change and fill with that. My tap water swings in ph as it rests. Test your water straight out of the tap and then in a glass after a few hours and see if they’re different. I was having the same kind of issues and I don’t anymore. It’s a little more work but I don’t have die offs and I have good populations in several shrimp tanks.
Had the same problem, what this sub suggested was:
Stop doing water changes, just slowly top off with RO water.
Keep track of your water parameter and do water change ONLY if necessary. Seriously, your tank probably doesn’t need water changes anyway (live plants are important here).
I also bought trace minerals and gh+ in liquid form and am adding them to my top off water every other day.
It’s been like month or two since I asked reddit for help and now I have new batch of babies swimming around and 3 pregnant mamas!
This is the way. Use bottled RO. Stabile water parms is the key. I keep shrimp with copper pipe and all is good. I found less water changes are better. Never gravel vac.
Awesome tank.
Is your water temperature the same as the water being added?
Neos can live in hard water when it’s consistent. They use them as ‘dither-fish’ in Sulawesi tanks to make them confident to come out in the tank.
> I use a squirt of Thrive-S ferts
I think that you might be spiking phosphates (or something) in your tank during water changes. First, run some activated carbon in the tank to see if there’s a toxin you’re unaware of, then try doing weekly, 20% water changes for a month without ferts, or any additives, and see what happens.
Finally, instead of using SaltyS to re-mineralize RO water, you can just dilute treated-tapwater with RO until you get your desired TDS. It would be easier to keep consistent and less expensive, once you buy your RO filter.
>Should I remove the shrimp, drain the tank and acclimate them
This. Do ensure you TDS/GH/KH/Temperature acclimate them (takes hours if done correctly) and put them back in.
This is clearly a toxic environment for them and *slowly* switching to distilled/RO is only delaying them from being comfortable. Then, don’t do any water changes and only top-off with distilled/RO as needed. I haven’t done water changes in my shrimp tanks for years and some are in bare-bottom tanks with just moss and floating plants.
>Tank is fairly heavily planted
This is not heavily planted, especially not with plants that absorb nitrogen efficiently (outside of the floaters). 20% of tank filled with some fast grower like limnophila sessiliflora will do more for water than all the plants you have today and 100% floater coverage will remove more than any submerged plant would. Not a problem if keeping only shrimp though! More [here](https://aquariumscience.org/index.php/6-6-aquaponic-filtration/)
Posting your water parameters would help a lot.
Have you tested for copper in your water? It’s possible that if you have copper pipes and acidic water you could be leaching copper into the water.
I’ve read that you can’t use only distilled water unless you add in nutrients.
I use a mix of distilled and tap water for mine.
May be a silly question, but are you adding any sort of conditioner or dechlorinator?
An RO unit can cost like $200. I bought the one on Amazon called ispring